Re: [Pen-l] Latin America and the dependency theory debate

["Jim Devine" <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

"kosher Marxists"? are they circumscribed?

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 12:38 PM, Julio Huato <juliohuato@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Louis Proyect wrote:
>
>> After Robert Brenner wrote his attack on
>> dependency theory in the 1977 NLR, the
>> impact was immediate.
>
> Latin American Marxists were very involved in debating the merits and
> demerits of dependency theory.  I imagine some works influential in
> Latin America were never translated into English.  From my own
> experience, I can say that some of these works were extremely
> influential in Mexico, shaping up the views of many young political
> activists.
>
> One of the most effective Marxist critics of dependentism (not the
> only one) was an Ecuadorian political scientist who taught at UNAM,
> Agustin Cueva.  Some of Cueva's critical essays were packaged in "El
> desarrollo del capitalismo en America Latina," a book published by
> Siglo XXI in the mid 1970s.  That year, the book received Siglo XXI's
> award to the best essay.
>
> Cuevas later deepened his critique of dependentism.  In 1979, he
> published another bunch of essays under the title "Teoria social y
> procesos politicos en America Latina."  However, this book was
> published by a less known publishing house and thus had much less
> diffusion.
>
> This may be obvious, but as far as I can tell, Marxists never disputed
> that Latin American capitalism was "dependent" or "interdependent in a
> subordinate sense" to the capitalism in the rich countries.  The
> issues were the mechanisms of such dependency or subordination
> (exploitation), its import or size, and the role they played in the
> evolution of Latin American social formations -- in particular whether
> such mechanisms of exploitation limited or enabled (or both) -- and
> how specifically one or the other -- the further development of
> capitalist production in Latin America.
>
> Agustin Cueva posed all these questions most sharply, in Marxist
> terms, and showed how the answers supplied by the dependency theorists
> were mostly wrongheaded in its understanding, predictions, and
> political implications.  IMO, what happened in Latin America and the
> world in the 3 subsequent decades was not only unexpected, but
> incomprehensible under the paradigm of dependency theory, while
> entirely discernible under Marxism.
>
> Having said that, I must admit that the dependentists as individuals
> have roughly remained on the right side of the popular struggles in
> Latin America in the last few decades, or -- at least -- that their
> effective political record is not worse than that of the kosher
> Marxists.  So, being right or wrong in the theory didn't keep anybody
> from taking the right or wrong political stances in important
> historical junctures in Latin America.
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-- 
Jim Devine /  "Nobody told me there'd be days like these / Strange
days indeed -- most peculiar, mama." -- JL.
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